Use boolean tools to add or­na­ments

Switch to the Pen tool and use it to cre­ate an out­line of a first-gen­er­a­tion iMac. Once you’re happy with its shape, make sure it’s not stroked and has a gra­di­ent. You can give the gra­di­ent any colour you want – we de­cided to make ours Bondi Blue, which suits the watery theme!

2 Giv­ing the iMac a fa­cia

We need to give our iMac a white fa­cia. Do this in the same way you drew the out­line in step 1, this time giv­ing it a very slight grey-to-white gra­di­ent. If you want to, you can add a lit­tle bit of depth to the iMac by cre­at­ing the in­side of the fa­cia – this is up to you but it can be very ef­fec­tive.

3 An iMac needs a screen

Use the Rec­tan­gle tool to draw a shape (of any colour) big enough to fill the iMac’s screen area. Move the pointer just past one of the rec­tan­gle’s corners so the cur­sor changes, then drag to ro­tate it to fill the area. Use the Pen tool to draw a rough shape around this, with a glassy el­lip­ti­cal gra­di­ent.

4 Ap­ply your first Boolean

Next, we’ll ap­ply a Boolean op­er­a­tion to the shapes made in the pre­vi­ous step. Se­lect the two lay­ers that were cre­ated, then click on the In­ter­sect tool near the right end of the tool­bar. As its icon sug­gests, this will cre­ate an in­ter­sec­tion of the two lay­ers. This will be our iMac’s screen.

5 Fin­ish­ing touches on the iMac

To make our iMac com­plete it needs speak­ers (well, the one that will be vis­i­ble) and a CD drive. Draw them us­ing the Pen tool and give both of them the same sky blue to dark royal blue gra­di­ent – although if you’ve de­cided on a dif­fer­ent colour of iMac, the gra­di­ent will need to match that.

6 Fish­ing with an ap­ple as bait

We need a line to hold the bait. Draw a straight line with the Pen tool, set its stroke to 0.9pt and, in the Brushes pal­ette, set the brush type to Im­age and choose Rope - Thick. Add the bait in the same way you cre­ated the iMac: draw an ap­ple and a leaf, and give both a green­ish ra­dial gra­di­ent.

7 Tak­ing a bite of the ap­ple

Our ap­ple needs a bite taken out of it. Cre­ate two over­lap­ping cir­cles, the right one a lit­tle larger, on sep­a­rate lay­ers. Colour the smaller one like an ap­ple’s flesh. Se­lect them and use the Di­vide tool. This cre­ates three lay­ers. Delete the right and mid­dle bits to leave the cres­cent-shaped bite.

8 Like a fish out of wa­ter

One of our fish is hun­gry and has jumped out of the fish bowl to try to eat the ap­ple. Cre­ate this fish in the same way we made the oth­ers in part two. This time, though, give the fish some teeth to hold onto the ap­ple. Adding a shadow from the teeth on the ap­ple makes it more re­al­is­tic.